Empty Mirror

a literary magazine

  • About
    • About Empty Mirror
    • Get in Touch
    • Support EM
    • Colophon
  • Submit
  • Contributors
  • Essays
  • On Literature
  • Poetry
  • Reviews
  • Art
  • Interviews
  • Beat
    • Beat Generation
    • Ted Joans Lives!
  • +
    • Fiction
    • Music & Film
    • News
    • On Writing
    • Book Collecting

Three poems by Linda E. Chown

Linda E. Chown

zuanich two / image: d. enck
zuanich two / image: de

More Than the Dying and the Wars and Our Words about Them

To sit here on this roof
with the Sierra Nevada mountains
in my mouth
and the Alhambra’s blossoming
gardens up my nose
and the tiled brown roofs
sloping and arching below me –
to sit here and be here
smoking, alive, sizzling a bit
in the sun.

Newspapers say nothing about this.
They want to make us
afraid.
They say people are dying
and the world’s all fucked up

I know I will go
behind the mountain
falling like a great snow-
covered cloud drifting,
and people are dying,
swollen up with need,
inching their way
through their way
like baby ants buried
under gray sand.

Take the papers away
and spread the world out
on the table.
Let’s eat it for breakfast
if we can.
Granada

Two Years in Europe Poem

I on the bed, shutters half-closed,
staring into the vacant holes
of an apartment half–done
the autumn sun casts a tinted yellow,
a mellow hue I look through
to the two years of living here
and all the many suns I drew,
of wind and rain and random thefts,
of gray hair coming and the griefs,
of full skies and autumn feasts;
no future it seems,
no surprises yet to come.

I lie ensconced in the heavy
cradle of the present.
These partial rhymes come like months
of light do, like I do,
passing through, passing through
the half-remembered glory
of wind-sounds and lip sounds
and the sun always off somewhere
writing her great orange story
in the lines of the sky
while I lie, trying to conjure something
solid out of my being
here so long.

Cádiz

Belief Is Not A Scoreboard

so, like Camus, whom I love,
belief is not a scoreboard,
a carbon copy of what
they said to be so
I am the forever wild child
running lone in what shines
suddenly

Share on X (Twitter)Share on Facebook

Linda E. Chown

Linda Chown is a poet and critic. Originally from Berkeley, she lived in the Bay Area until going to Spain and teaching there for some 15 years. Now living in Michigan, she is professor emerita at Grand Valley State University. She has published work in Signs, Numero Cinq, Foothill Quarterly, and many other journals. There is also a book comparing novelist Carmen Martín Gaite and Doris Lessing called Narrative Authority and Homeostasis in Selected Writings of Carmen Martín Gaite and Doris Lessing, as well as extensive writings on Lessing, Woolf, Martin Gaite, Willa Cather, and Coetzee. Recent reviews and poems, including "On The Other Side of Language, appear in Numero Cinq's archives.

Author: Linda E. Chown Tags: poetry Category: Poetry September 28, 2018

You might also like:

pieces of the story / credit: de
At the Carnival of Drunken Poets
Farandole by Julie Sargent
Poems by Lucía Estrada, translated by Olivia Lott
The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volumes 1 and 2
Taking the Poet at his Word: Editing the Poems of T. S. Eliot
Midnight
A Night in Spain

Comments

  1. Billy Mills says

    October 6, 2018 at 2:09 am

    Great to see Linda’s work here.

    Reply
  2. Sam Silva says

    September 29, 2018 at 3:17 pm

    these poems are so wonderfully alive

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

I accept the Privacy Policy

 

DONATE TO BLACK LIVES MATTER

BLACK LIVES MATTER

The EM newsletter

Receive fresh poetry, reviews, essays, art, and literary news every Wednesday!


Empty Mirror

Established in 2000 and edited by Denise Enck, Empty Mirror is an online literary magazine that publishes new work each Friday.

Each week EM features several poems each by one or two poets; reviews; critical essays; visual art; and personal essays.

Subscribe Submissions Support

Recent features

  • My Father’s Map
  • On Waiting
  • Seeing Las Meninas in Madrid, 1994
  • Visual poems from 23 Bodhisattvas by Chris Stephenson
  • Historical Punctum: Reading Natasha Trethewey’s Bellocq’s Ophelia and Native Guard Through the Lens of Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida
  • Panic In The Rear-View Mirror: Exploring The Work of Richard Siken and Ann Gale
  • “Art has side effects,” I said.

Books

Biblio
© 2000–2025 D. Enck / Empty Mirror.
Copyright of all content remains with its authors.
Privacy Policy · Privacy Tools · FTC disclosures